And so it began…

And so, it began…

Mississippi Origins

I was born in 1959, in a small-town hospital in northeast Mississippi. We lived out in the country, so I went to a rural school called New Hope for twelve years—the same school my mother had attended back in the 1930s and 40s. I’ve never known why the community was called New Hope. New hope for what? Cooler weather? Less mosquitoes? Maybe some church thing.

Speaking of church. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church; there every time the doors were...